My Musical Evolution – Page 41 – Mapping Influences Over Time

My Musical Evolution – Part 13 Scratchy 45 Days

It occured to me that in our modern era, the record label has disappeared. The record companies seem to make themselves known in various ways, mostly litigation. As I think about it now, I don’t really even know which record companies are producing the music that I listen to. I guess it isn’t a big deal, it just seems like a big change from the 1970’s. Again, maybe it was due to the fact that our musical world in The Scratchy 45 Days was limited to mom’s records, but I was able to recall a bunch of labels without much effort.

The visual art of the label has been etched into my mind. Even in cases where the label name escaped me, a Bing Image search brought back a host of recognizable record labels. It makes me wonder if this disappearing act was in an attempt to put more emphasis on the artists or was it merely to reduce the mind share of the companies behind the industry so that they might be able to conduct their dastardly plans in anonymity.

As I looked around for familiar label art, it exposed another aspect of my personality. I like categories and I like organizing. I had forgotten that one of the ways in which I would compile my Scratchy 45 playlists was by label. Segregating the MGMs from the DECCA’s, from the RCA, from the Capitols etc.

I’m still kind of stunned by the sudden realization that I’m not even aware of which big record companies are around. I used to know that stuff. It seemed kind of important back then. I know that a decade or two ago, Prince had a big fight with his record company resulting in him changing his name to something that had to be translated into The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. I have no idea which company that was.

At what point did this shift occur? I remember Blondie was with Chrysalis and Mötley Crüe was picked up by Elektra then it all seems to fade away with the tide. Sorry to go on about this so much, it just really surprised me.

So on with our next stack of 7 from The Scratchy 45 Days. We’ll start things off with Clint Holmes – Playground In My Mind

Here is Johnny Nash – I Can See Clearly Now

Gladys Knight And The Pips – You’re The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me

Do you remember this? Coven and One Tin Soldier

It seems that most people seem to associate that song with the film Billy Jack. I didn’t see that movie until much, much later but I actually recall seeing this cartoon on some 70’s variety show. There were so many back then it seems.

So we turn to Little Peggy March – I Will Follow Him

Before The Lion King, there were The Tokens – The Lion Sleeps Tonight

This brings us to our final record in this stack of 7 is Tony Orlando & Dawn – Knock Three Times another of my early favorites.

The accompanying video was a little creepy but I hope that didn’t take away from the music. So that is it for this stack of 7. for those of you that know me and have witnessed my media library, what does this tell you? Are you gaining any insight to The Eclectic Collection?

My Musical Evolution – Part 12 Enter ABBA

I can’t say for sure what year it was. We had taken a family vacation to Vermont to visit my cousins. It seemed that ABBA was all over the radio and mom picked up a few singles to bring home with us. Not a lot to say about ABBA. I really liked their stuff. At some poiint in the CD era, I picked up 2 volumes of their greatest hits. I really don’t know much about them and that itself is strange. Usually when I’m interested in a band, I’ll do some research and try to find out more. With ABBA, I didn’t but I still like their stuff, enjoy.

S.O.S.

Honey, Honey

Waterloo

I Do I Do I Do I Do

Fernando

Mamma Mia

Dance (While The Music Still Goes On)

My Musical Evolution – Part 11 Scratchy 45 Days

I don’t remember. Did I explain why I call this period the Scratchy 45 Days? It should be self explanatory. Mom had a bunch of 45s. Since they were vinyl records, they would carry that hiss and pop. To make matters worse, we weren’t very good at taking care of them. It still makes me cringe to this day to think of all those great records sitting inside a 1970’s end table cabinet without protective sleeves and rummaged and stacked by 7 and unders.

Let’s start this stack of 7 with The Beach Boys – In My Room. Somehow, while I was at prep school, The Beach Boys would enter my collection and I listened to them quite a bit. We’ll see them again in 1982.

I’ve always liked Mary Hopkins’ and the “old world” feel of Those Were The Days

I don’t remember which came first, listening to Sugar, Sugar or watching The Archie Cartoons on Saturday morning. Mom was a big fan of Archie comic books at some point. She used to have quite a few of them that I remember reading. I’ll have to look Archie up. It seems to me that her comics were pretty old by the time I got to reading them. I just saw this documentary about The Monkees. I mention it here because Sugar, Sugar was originally going to be a Monkees song. Before the Monkees could record it, they had a falling out with Don Kirshner. Don didn’t care for the disrepect and rebellion he was getting from some of the Monkees so he decided that his next pop group would be animated. Cartoons don’t talk back. So he created the Archies and sugar, Sugar became their song. I wonder what it would have sounded like as performed by the Monkees.

The Archies – Sugar Sugar

This Scratchy 45 didn’t have a label on it and it had a crack all the way through. We called it the doo-doo-doo song after the sound of the intro. It would be years later that I would discover that this nameless song was in fact Cruel Sea by The Ventures. It sounds a bit different without the extra beat that the crack added.

Another instrumental piece that also sounds like it could be the soundtrack for an early 1980’s video game. My media library has quite a lot of instrumental music. I don’t know, I just really like long musical pieces that are not muddied with words. Hot Butter – Popcorn

Never been too much into Neil Young but this one reaches me. I’m sure that some music experts will be disappointed but I just can’t get into Neil Young and I think Bob Dylan is horrible. Neil Young – Heart Of Gold

Edward Bear’s Last Song is another one of those sad sounding songs that I was really drawn to. I’m sure that I didn’t fully comprehend the emotion behind the words. I was in first grade and had never been dumped. I did recognize that it was about loss. I remember writing the lyrics out in school. My teacher saw the paper on my desk and thought it was some kind of love lettter.

Incidentally, it turns out that Edward is no relation to Smokey. So there you go. I hope you liked this stack. Of course you can use the comment section below to share your thoughts.

My Musical Evolution – Part 10 Andy Williams

Andy Williams used to be one of mom’s favorites so there were a few Andy Williams albums as well as singles. I remember the album The Impossible Dream. It was a bunch of Andy Williams covers. I’ve looked around but The Impossible Dream is not available on CD. That’s too bad, I’d pick it up if only for nostalgia.

Andy has a smooth style and delivery. He’s not Dean Martin but I’d say he’s probably one of my favorites in his particular category. Let’s listen to a few Andy Williams songs and then you can use the comments section and tell me what you think about Andy.

Here’s Can’t Get Used To Losing You.

The Theme From Love Story

Here is Can’t Take My Eyes Off You

See, he has a pretty good voice and that 1960’s performance style. Here’s Born Free

Well here’s one I haven’t heard for a long time. I really need to try to dig up some of these. I Will Wait For You.

How About El Condor Pasa? What does that mean anyway?

Just a couple more and then we’ll move on. The Impossible Dream

OK Last one. Good Morning Starshine with the Osmond Brothers.

Andy has a lot of music out there. A quick scan of Amazon shows a plethora of double albums on CD. Yes, the Eclectic Collection has plenty of lounge style singers like Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Tom Jones. The strangest part is that although Andy Williams was the first of them that I knew of and liked, I don’t have any of his numerous CDs. I’ll have to look into that. Really, putting this post together was the first time I’ve listened to Andy Williams in decades, apart from some Christmas Songs. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Creating My Musical Evolution has been a lot of fun. To stop and look back and to listen to some of these old tunes on YouTube. I know life is busy and it is hard to slow down but I highly recommend trying to recall the earliest musical memories you have and try to find those songs and listen to them again.

My Musical Evolution – Part 9 Diving Into Mom’s Records

As I mentioned previously, The Scratchy 45 Days were powered by my adoring mother’s extensive collection of 45 rpm singles taken from top 40 style AM radio. What I’m struggling with now is how to represent all that music in a cohesive yet entertaining and educational manner. Here are a couple of thoughts. I could simply play DJ for you and line up each post with a stack of 7 songs and interject a comment here or there when it seems appropriate to me. I could try to focus on the artists represented and line up several songs from each with comments as I think of things. I’m not too sure so the next few posts will be somewhat experimental. It will probably be a combination of those two approaches. Mom had a few albums but mostly it was 1 – 4 records per artist. I can’t see me devoting an entire post to The Starland Vocal Band even though Afternoon Delight is attached to some great memories for me.

I think this time we’ll just set the old record player up with a stack of 7. Keep in mind that I’m disregarding release dates and not trying to recreate a particular year. I’m just pulling record’s out of mom’s collection that she started before I was born and that we enjoyed until the late 1970’s. Don’t judge, just enjoy.

Up first and completely at random. Eric Clapton – I Shot The Sheriff

I never really got too much into Clapton. Mom had this song but it would take me all the way until his Unplugged performance before I’d go back and get more.

Next we have some early Bee Gees – How Can You Mend A Broken Heart

There were only a couple Bee Gees records in the pile. It was when I was in middle school that the Bee Gees did Saturday Night Fever and really exploded.

How about some Dionne Warwick – Do You Know The Way To San Jose

Are you noticing the variety in styles. Sure, they were all mainstream pop music songs. Mom didn’t have any Pink Floyd, I’d have to find them later with help from my friends.

Keep in mind that these were records that my mother had been collecting for a while and we were just spinning them and having a great time. Here’s Climax – Precious And Few

Precious and Few would eventually get linked to a girl in the 1980’s but that’s another story.

The Hits just keep coming! I used to really like this one for some reason. There is something about a sad song. The Poppy Family – That’s Where I Went Wrong

For the most part, I’ve been a lyrics last music appreciator. I really enjoy the music parts and the beat. sometimes I don’t’ even pay attention to what they are saying. Maybe that is what pushes me toward a lot of instrumental stuff. I don’t have to be bothered with lyrics. There are times though the words mean everything. I’ll try to point some of those out when we run across them.

I’m not sure who is making these videos, I just hope you are enjoying the music. Do you remember Badfinger – Day After Day

That opening guitar part was a favorite of mine back then. It still sounds good today. It is hard to fathom that these songs are all around 40 years old. Do you remember them on the radio?

Well we have room on the stack for one more. Let’s wrap up with John Lennon – Imagine

Imagine is a great song and I really enjoy listening to it and playing along on my bass. I’m just a little troubled by the lyrics. It seems easy for a man who has everything to tell the rest of us to imagine no possessions. Still it was a shame he had to die that way. I would eventually get not only his CDs but some of his son’s too. You’ll see.

So what do you think so far. Mom had some pretty great records. I feel very fortunate to have had access to all this music. some of it was truly great stuff. Some of it was fluff. All them bring back emotions and memories of being a kid in the 1970’s.

Unlike those Disney records, it isn’t too hard to find these songs on CD. I got my first CD Player in late 1985. I’ll tell you more about that later. I’ve invested time and money in collecting all these great songs on CD. The Super Hits Of The 70’s – Have A Nice Day collection of 25 CDs were a good place to start. A lot of mom’s old 45s can be found in that collection. Maybe I’ll start adding links to where you can find them.

My Musical Evolution – Part 8 Scratchy 45 Days

The really sad thing that I’ve realized in doing this project is that such a large portion of the music that I listened to and liked up to this point is simply lost to time and the weakness of the vinyl medium. Those early Disney records are not likely to be re-released on CD. This is a shame as I’d really be interested in buying some of those to give them a fresh listen now. If you scour the internet, you might find where somebody has ripped the album to mp3 and I suppose that is better than nothing. I’d still prefer pristine remastered CDs. Fortunately, most of the music going forward from this point has been released on CD in some manner. Enter Pop Music.

As I approached six, a few things all seemed to happen at once. We moved, I could successfully operate the record player and I could read. It all seemed to happen overnight. I think that the floor plan of our new house made the stereo accessible. It was just there, in the living room where I could get to it. And in the end table cabinet next to it was hundreds of records. The result was my sudden exposure to pop music. As we have seen, I have been a music appreciator since very early childhood. I feel that I owe this to my mother who had a fondness for pop music. It was the early 1970’s and she had amassed a rather large collection of hit singles on 45 rpm records. There were a few dozen LP albums but the bulk was 45 singles. Mom listened to what was the equivalent of Top 40 radio on the old AM stations. This was at the dawn of FM radio when it seemed that the only thing you could find on FM was elevator music. I’ve always referred to this segment of my musical evolution as “The Scratchy 45 Days”.

The Scratchy 45 Days was a major influence in my musical evolution. I was influenced by my mother’s record collection which was influenced by the radio. She had some favorite artists like Neil Diamond and Andy Williams but her records covered so many of the artists of the era. Granted they all more or less fell in that top 40 genre but the variety of artists and songs introduced me to so much great music. Since she liked Neil Diamond so much, there were several Neil Diamond records. To this day, Neil Diamond is one of my favorites of this era. When I hear Sweet Caroline, I can feel what it was like to be young in early 1970’s and it ain’t bad.

The Scratchy 45 Days era lasted until somewhere between 3rd and 4th grade. As we explore mom’s old 45’s I’m not going to pay too much attention to chronology. I could try to go through her records in my mind and try to share them with you by release date but that would take too much effort. Just imagine a big cabinet full of records that are stacked in no particular order. We’re just going to grab a few and check them out.

My sisters and I used to take turns playing DJ. We’d sort through the stacks of records and pick out our favorites then set them into stacks of 7. Our record player was one of those that would allow you to stack 7 records on the spindle at once and at the end of record the next one would automatically drop down and play but you could not load more than 7. As I write that I wonder if that 7 was established as a result of reading the instructions or trial and error. It also seems weird that I’d have to explain that mechanism but it simply hasn’t existed in the mainstream for so long. I remember when my daughter was 3 or 4. She got a Barbie doll and accessories for her birthday. This would have been around 1996. the accessories were a microwave, a portable CD player, a “boom box” and a record player. I asked what each one was and she got them all but the record player. She had never seen one. I don’t know that she ever has even at 19. The last time I had a turntable hooked up to anything was November of 1988 but I’ll get to that later. Don’t let me forget.

I still play “DJ”. I always have. The format has changed through the years. I used to make mix tapes, then CD compilations and now the digital media player shuffle. Even here, as I share My Musical Evolution, I’m playing DJ for you. Here’s another of mom’s early favorites. I vaguely remember mom going to see Sonny & Cher live when they came to town way back in the day.

Is Sonny wearing a bath rug? We’ve got lots more ahead. What songs stick out to you from the early 1970’s? Use the comments area to share.

Shirley Bassey – Goldfinger

Petula Clark – Downtown

My Musical Evolution – Part 7 Working On The Railroad

So we approach a transitional moment. Up to this point,with a couple of exceptions, the music has almost all come from Disney or had been Disney-fied in some way. This album The Little Engine That Could – And Other Railroad Songs And Sound Effects was made by Happy Time Chorus. I did a quick Bing search on Happy Time and saw that they did a bunch of records back in the day. We might have even had a couple of them but this is the one that stuck with me.

You might notice the continuation of the sound effects genre. I’m not sure what drew me to sound effects maybe it was just something that went well with an active imagination.

The reason I feel that this is transitional is that this is where I not turned a corner so much as altered course a little. Sure, the album begins with the children’s tale of the Little Engine That Could which is consistent with Disney. You know, whistle while you work, a spoonful of sugar. This expands that idea with a believe in yourself attitude. Decades later, I would be introduced to Earl Nightingale and his Strangest Secret which is a very similar concept. I remember having this philosophical discussion on the playground in elementary school. What if the only reason that you can’t fly is because people told that it was impossible and you believe them.

Sidetracked again. Speaking of sidetrack, that sounds like a railway derived sentiment. Apart from the story and the sound effects and maybe the old I’ve been working on the railroad song, the rest of the tracks on this album did not seem to be children’s songs. They were grown up songs, folk songs. Thus the transition into more adult oriented music add to that the fact that I was nearly old enough to operate the stereo. My musical evolution was about to reach an explosive point thanks to my mother and her love for pop music.

I recognized the cover of this album right away. It seems to be vanishing from this earth. I tried to think back to the songs that were on it and really the only one that stood the test of time and memory is the one listed as Patsy Ory-Ory-Aye. Like I’ve done so many times since I started this, I went to YouTube to try to find a good sample of Patsy Ory-Ory-Aye to include here for you. I came up empty. As it turns out The song really is Paddy On The Railway. I guess the Happy Time people felt that they needed to alter it for political correctness or to make it child friendly. It has a definite Irish feel to it even though it was toned down a little on the album compared to the versions I found on YouTube. I have to wonder why this was my favorite song on this album. Was that Irish-ness speaking to me at five? Was this almost forgotten tune the seed of my gravitation to The Dropkick Murphys or The Dubliners or any of that Irish / Celtic stuff that I’ve acquired? Is this song why I married the daughter of an Irishman? We’ll get to Whiskey In The Jar later but now it is time to work upon the railway

Wolfe Tones – Paddy On The Railway

My Musical Evolution – Part 6 Objects Not A Scary As They Appear

I don’t think think this project would have even been possible if it were not for the vastness of the internet. It would be impossible for me to physically track down the materials to generate the images or share the musical samples or do the memory jogging research. At the end of this post, I’m going to ask you to use the comments section and post the first song that you loved. I want you to be honest, I’m not here to judge. I know some of you might be tempted to try to be cool. There’s no shame in liking a song. There are so many things to like, the beat, the lyrics, the message, the artist, the feeling it gives you to listen to it or sing along. So remind me at the end.

If you have been following My Musical Evolution from the beginning you may have noticed that from the very beginning I have had a fascination with “scary” stuff. I mentioned before, Ghosts, Castles, Dinosaurs and Monsters were very interesting to me. I was also nearly coerced into being a cowboy but it didn’t last long. That influence came from my dad’s side of the family. They had been in the USA for a very long time. Farming and cattle and cowboys. My mom’s side were relative newcomers to these United States. They came from Germany and England in the 1890’s. Maybe that is where my ghost and castle thing came from. So on mom’s side crime drama on dad’s side, Gunsmoke, Bonanza and John Wayne. I did like The Lone Ranger for a while, another early classical theme.

Scarecrow I’m getting way side tracked, I just wanted to share a couple more things from the final year before being old enough to operate the stereo without assistance. Both of these things had to have been selected by me and only because they had creepishly interesting covers. The Scarecrow Of Romney Marsh was movie or TV show or something that I never saw which reinforces my belief that I saw this cover and thought “That looks scary.” The song turned out to be interesting. It tells the story of a guy who much like the Headless Horseman would ride around coastal England scare the crap out people. However, the Scarecrow had an element of Robin Hood. He seemed to only scare the corrupt King and his soldiers while protecting the common folk. Maybe I should see if this is on Netflix. I’ll share the song below. Check it out. The Scarecrow’s laugh could have really been much scarier but again this was still Disney.

Which brings us to the next stop. What do you notice? Yes, a creepy looking cover. If you are over forty, you might recognize this album. If you called my house in the mid 1980’s you probably heard some of the sound effects found on this record. Yes I still had it then and often used the sounds in my telephone answering machine productions. If you are not familiar with this record, Side one is basically several tracks featuring various sound effects mixed together to tell an audio story that was set up with a little narrative introduction. Side 2 is just sound effects.Like most sound effects albums of this nature, they are fun to listen to but never scary enough. I enjoyed the album anyway but probably not as much as I enjoyed the album art on the cover. I mean, look at that creepy house and graveyard. There’s a light on in the tower!

I know sound effects may not seem to directly contribute to my musical evolution but looking at my Eclectic Collection today you will find several sound effects albums as well as a host of Halloween themed albums. Perhaps collecting scary looking records and scary sounds were more educational as I continued to train to be a headless horseman. How does somebody so young develop the desire to scare people and enjoy scary things so much? Is that way for everybody? Was this how Stephen King was at five? Am I way behind the curve in writing my anthology of terrifying tales? Maybe I’m more like John Carpenter. I feel more like making scary movies than writing scary novels. I guess it’s not too late. So we really are winding down this phase in my musical evolution. I think I have one more part to write about before the plunge into pop music and that has to do with working on the railroad but for now, The Scarecrow Of Romney Marsh.

You weren’t even going to remind me!. Use the comments section below to share your very first favorite song with us. Don’t rush. Give it some real thought. Think back to your earliest memories. If your experience is like mine, the first song you think of isn’t the first song you loved but it was close. Give it a little more thought and a little more time and see if you come up with something unexpected.

My Musical Evolution – Part 5 The First Taste Of Classical

Who or what are our earliest musical influences? I am the oldest of three children. My two younger sisters are 2 1/2 and 6 years younger than me. I feel sorry for them in a way. I’m sure that being older, even though I was still too young to operate the audio equipment, I probably had more influence over what we listened to. I imagine that I pulled them along on this journey. I mean that is the nature of the evolution. You encounter events, people and other forces that nudge into a direction. Sometimes you try harder to like something if somebody you like likes it first. It makes me wonder if my love of dinosaurs, castles, monsters and ghosts affected my sisters and the music they would eventually be drawn towards.

Somewhere around here, a couple classical pieces disguised as more Disney records made there way into our home. Peter And The Wolf / The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was interesting. Sterling Holloway did the narration in his distinctive voice. Of course the “wax on / wax off” aspect of Peter And The Wolf is the introduction of various instruments from the orchestra. I learned what they were called and the kinds of sounds they made. Very basic of course but just about the right speed for the under five. An interesting exercise really to link a flute to an imaginary bird in a story.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was good too. i think at some point we had seen the cartoon on television so when the music played, it was easy to imagine Mickey’s magic causing so much trouble with the broomstick shaped automatons and all that water. It would be another seven years before my next push into classical music. It would be 15 years after that before I’d acquire The Sorcerer’s Apprentice on CD. Not the Mickey Mouse version but the actual grown up version but it was Mickey that told me what to look for.

I had not seen Fantasia yet. Never heard of Tchaikovsky but I did enjoy just about every track on this album. I think on the back were alligators and hippos in tutus. Maybe that was something else. What are those things supposed to be on the cover? Dancing Asian anthropomorphic mushrooms? It didn’t make sense but the music was a good mix some slow and soulful some faster and more rambunctious. Mom saw that we was gettin’ cultured. I didn’t know it at the time but I would eventually see The Nutcracker Suite performed in Boston by the Boston Ballet. Before you scoff at attending the ballet, you should see the balconies in that old building. If you thought Lucas Oil Stadium was steep. The part when the Christmas tree grows was amazing that tree had to be several stories tall on that stage. We’re getting ahead of the story. We’ll talk about The Nutcracker again during my Classical reawakening phase. I will say one more thing about The Nutcracker. I was looking up Tchaikovsky a few years ago. Something I do with the internet is research things from time to time. I found some really interesting things about Tchaikovsky. One that has always stuck with me was that he didn’t like The Nutcracker Suite very much. He knew that it would be popular and it bothered him that when people would remember him it would be because of the Nutcracker. “Whatever happened to that Nutcracker guy?”

So there we are, my first taste of classical music. Nothing too serious. Nothing too hard to digest. Just enough to encourage. I’m sure that it was a nice change of pace for mom.

My Musical Evolution – Part 4 Overdose On Disney

I have to admit that I am rather enjoying this exercise in cranial archaeology. To quietly focus on the earliest memories possible and to be able to draw out such things. Well let’s say that this project could be a real journey of self discovery. I’m resisting the temptation to consult my mother and sisters about any of this until after I’ve thoroughly attempted to document what I believe to be the truth. I did send them links to the site and openly welcome any comments that they wish to post. Now moving forward. Where did all these Disney albums come from.?

I can only assume that my mother, driven to the brink of madness after hearing The Headless Horseman and Hawaii Five-O for the 102,639th time ran screaming to Mr. Wigg’s and loaded up on anything that might appeal to a 4 year old and his baby sister.

Of course, I hadn’t thought of these records for decades until the day before yesterday but when I put old Disney records into the Bing image search, I recognized them immediately. The top left here, Walt Disney’s Happiest Songs is an album cover that I spent a great deal of time examining as a four year old. I mean it takes place on the castle wall and there are so many stories going on. The tracks included Heigh-Ho, When You Wish Upon A Star, Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo, Bella Notte, you Can Fly, Winnie The Pooh, Super cali fragilistic expiali docious, I Wonder, Bare Necessities and more. you can imagine this would entertain me at that age. I can remember certain thoughts that the songs would invoke, you know like eating ants. I wonder if Bella Notte was the foundation for my appreciation of Dean Martin. Right now as I try to imagine how Bella Notte [From Lady and the Tramp] goes, it keeps getting mashed up with Deano’s Innamorata. Remind me to tell you about the dream I had when Dean Martin was singing AC/DC. It comes up around 2005 I think.

The Merriest Melodies had more of the same, Whistle While You Work, Cinderella’s Work Song, Babes In Toyland Workshop Song. Wow, I just realized that The Merriest Songs are all about slave labor. Was that a subliminal message that Walt was trying to instill in the children? “Hey, works sucks but if you have a good attitude you’ll slog through it!”

The last four are albums that were adapted from movies. By adapted I mean that they used the dialog and soundtrack from the films to create an audio version. Basically string all the songs together with dialog from the film mixed with a touch of narration to get us through the visually heavy bits. Again, who can say why a four year old thinks the things he does or why certain elements of these records stood out in such a way. For example, as I look at the Mickey And The Beanstalk cover, the remnants that persevere play in my mind. The Magic Harp singing the location of the key to her would be rescuers, for example. Why is that tiny snippet significant to me? Another highlight is the sound that the giant makes as he plummets to his death. Did he die? Would Walt let that happen? I don’t know for sure. I never saw Mickey And The Beanstalk, I only heard it. He sounded dead to me.

In All About Dragons, I vaguely imagine the magical duel that ends with one of the combatants illegally turning into a dragon only to be vanquished by her opponent becoming a germ. It was the rough quality of the evil witch’s voice that make it stick. In Dumbo, I felt the sadness as Dumbo’s mother sang to him at their parting. I was also annoyed with birds. They always struck me as trouble makers. As for the 101 Dalmatians, my favorite bit was after the car crash and Cruella DeVille is ranting until one of her henchmen says “Shuuut Up!” four year olds think that is funny. I couldn’t wait to get to that part. With the exception of the Cruella DeVille song, the rest of the music there escapes me.

So what does this all contribute to My Musical Evolution? Maybe nothing. I’m trying to be thorough so if any influences or connections are present, they might be exposed. Right now, I’m thinking out the Disney albums we’ve just looked at. Think about the just the music for a moment. disregard the Disney lyrics or the stories that they came from. There are a lot of different styles of music here. From the Italian themed Bella Notte to the Zoot Suit-ish Cruella DeVille to Bare Necessities which sounds like it came right out of New Orleans, the wide variety of musical styles expressed in just these select Disneyland Records is a microcosm of the Eclectic collection. Wow, is this therapeutic? I’ll leave you with some of the Happiest songs.